Anecdotal datapoint. My wife is Chinese and, due to things like being president of the parent/teacher association at our kid's school, she's involved in quite a few large wechat groups in China. They were outraged about this Huawei CFO arrest. Many of them swore off Apple phones and said they were only going to buy Huawei from now on. Over my last 10 years in China, I've never seen it like this. I expect Apple's growth in China has peaked.
Apple is American. They think American / the West is trying to humiliate China again. So they say they will stop buying Apple ( for now ). Relation to Apple being Huawei is a phone company ( Well to most consumer they are, when in fact they are more like a Telecom Infrastructure Giant ).
You forgot those Apple listed prices are US only and never included any Sales Tax. In reality everywhere on the planet are paying $100 to $200 more on top of those prices. In the case of China has both Import, and Sales Tax. ( It works more like VAT though ), it adds up to around $300 on top of $999, closer to $1299.
Edit: Yes in case Apple is ridiculously expensive in many part of the world.
First of all, you're quoting prices in China, which means that iPhone has significant taxes tacked on to it. Second, iPhone seems to be $1269, while the Huawei phone is $977.
iPhone is 256GB version vs Huawei's 128GB version. Huawei P20 comes with only one storage tier which is 128GB. So I chooses the middle tier to represent iPhone.
I am surprised you haven't seen anything like it. It happened against Korea, Japan, and Taiwan although the magnitude of scale wasn't anywhere as large as Huawei.
And it is not like this is the first time Apple has been under attack anyway. If you are carrying out Business in China with any sort of Government involvement ( which is pretty much 90%+ ) you need to use a phone from Chinese brand to prove your loyalty.
Does the OnePlus have the same tech as iPhone? Are you comparing it fairly? The Galaxy Note 9 is $1000 in the US. The 6T gets crushed by the A12 chip in the XR. The XR is about $150 more than the 6T, comparing it with the Max is disingenuous. The XR also has one hour longer battery life. The XR also has FaceID. So the 6T has a worse camera, dramatically slower processor, and lower-life battery. You are free to make a comparison, but it’s comparing a Hyundai with an Audi. The XR costs more because you are getting more. Whether or not you want that “more” is a personal choice, but let’s not pretend that the XR is overpriced. Apple could make a shittier phone and end up priced like the 6T. OnePlus is also operating at barely any profit. So if you took out Apple’s average 38% margin, that puts the XR at $464; so Apple is making a much better phone at a lower price than OnePlus — which makes OnePlus’s tech all the more disappointing: they spend more than Apple and ship a worse phone.
The 2018 MacBook Air isn’t 2x the price of a 2017 Air in the United States. First of all, the 2017 MacBook Air was actually a 2015 MacBook Air with a tiny bump in clock speed. Retail price in 2017 was $999. Retail price in 2018? $1199. The 2018 has Touch ID and retina which the 2017 version didn’t. That’s not even close to “2x the price.)” The tariffs pre-2018 were 15% on computers, now they are over 17%. Then there is an 18% sales tax on top of that! So 35% of the MacBook Air cost in India is just taxes. That means the government of India makes as much “profit” on a laptop as Apple does for making the damned things. Perhaps have a chat with your government about those high tariffs? Apple didn’t double the price, your taxes went up.
Here in India, the 2018 Macbook Air is about $1550. The 2017 version is $920.
I've been using a OnePlus 5T and honestly can't fathom any reason why I would want a faster processor any time soon. And the OnePlus 6T is even faster.
I'm just saying that charging people $1500 for a phone and then wondering why they're not buying any is a dumb strategy.
doesn't feel or look different enough to matter - and that's what matters to most consumers. apple used to have a monopoly on looks and speed. now android flagships have gotten 90percent of the way there for 50 percent of the price
It is not how it is played out elsewhere in the world. First there is additional tax Apple is putting on upon the US retail price tag. Second, almost all foreign currency had deprecated against dollars in 2018. 2x might be dramatic, but 150% is what I see with my own eyes.
That doesn't change the fact Apple chooses to have the customers pay for it to maintain its own margin. It is not wrong, but it does make it expensive.
Sorry if this sounds accusatory, but do you have Face ID on any of your devices? It seems like you might not, since you're "not upgrading". I'm asking this because I have found Face ID to be generally better than Touch ID, but I had to use it a couple of times to "get" it.
It's all biometric facial recognition and comes with the same problems. Quite frankly the face unlock on the Surface makes more sense than on a phone due to nature of the device. It's larger, more likely to be used at a desk while sitting that type of thing.
With my phone I want to unlock it without taking my eyes off the road so I can use voice recognition to map my destination or make a voice call. The absolute last thing I want to screw around with while driving is looking at my phone.
> It's all biometric facial recognition and comes with the same problems.
This isn't remotely close to being true. Face ID and Window Hello (I think that's what it's called?) are quite different, technically.
> Quite frankly the face unlock on the Surface makes more sense than on a phone due to nature of the device. It's larger, more likely to be used at a desk while sitting that type of thing.
Again, I urge you to actually use the thing rather than trying to come up with a mental model of why it's horrible because of your experience with the Surface.
> With my phone I want to unlock it without taking my eyes off the road so I can use voice recognition to map my destination or make a voice call.
1. You don't need to unlock your phone to do this.
2. You can disable the setting to require looking at your phone to unlock it.
1. In my case, yes I do. I run Amazon Music in my car with Apple CarPlay pretty much all the time. Amazon Music has some kind of bug when connected to CarPlay where it will often take over audio input and you cannot get around it without first unlocking the phone.
2. Not looking at the phone does not change that my face has to be within view of the phone. Honestly, this comment makes me wonder if you have used the Surface face recognition. You never have to look at it; it's actually pretty good, but it is still my personal preference to use a pin. Touch ID is more convenient than facial recognition IMHO.
To be clear, I never said it was horrible, I was stating that it is not an improvement FOR ME. I love the fingerprint reader. This whole topic is about Apple's sales declining. Quite frankly, I wouldn't have upgraded from the 7 to 8 series if my iPhone 7 hadn't broken. The 7 was "good enough". At this stage the "improvements" to the iPhone are incremental and not enough of an improvement to be worth the cost of upgrading; clearly, others agree with me or iPhone sales wouldn't be on the decline.
RE #2 IME disabling the “require attention” setting just reduces the degree to which you have to obstruct your vision. You’re still obstructing your vision much more and for longer than with fingerprint unlock.
“Hey Siri, directions to the nearest Trader Joe’s.” Done. How are you mapping destinations without looking at the phone? If you are using voice, you don’t need touchId. If you aren’t using voice, then you are obviously looking at the phone. I doubt you are one handed touch typing on a phone in a moving car.
I'm gonna notice that you left "remove headphone jack" alone. Because everybody, universally, understands that removing the headphone jack is a terrible idea.
> Because everybody, universally, understands that removing the headphone jack is a terrible idea.
I've argued this point before, and wasn't particularly in the mood to discuss it again. There are multiple reasons I didn't bring it up:
1. I use an iPhone SE, so I'm not really qualified discuss this. I do exclusively use AirPods now, though, so I have the feeling that I wouldn't mind the lack of a headphone jack now.
2. The removal of the headphone jack was not done in a vacuum; it's pretty obvious that if there was no drawbacks, it would be great to have a headphone jack in my iPhone. But we live in a world where tradeoffs exist–otherwise, my phone would have every port that ever existed in the last thirty years.
I’m in the camp that firmly believes that AirPods or an AirPod-equivalent completes the general audio experience on an iPhone. Being able to trivially link them to my laptop is also very nice, but what really makes it is being able to invoke and use Siri reliably when my phone is in my pocket so long as the network conditions aren’t crap.
That said, removing or not including certain features does make it less of a general purpose device that is less useful to more people. Apple has been ragged on from day one for not including some form of SD card support, an FM tuner and a removable battery. To this day there are people that will refuse to buy a phone without those features.
They might not be strictly necessary features, but they still sell phones, or at least make them viable to the kind of person that demands them, but Apple still sold hundreds of millions of iOS devices without those features.
Then they removed the headphone jack too. To a group of people that were never concerned about the lack of removable media, a radio tuner, and a removable battery and bought iPhones for years, they suddenly lost one feature they actually used and were told to buy a single instead.
I mean if your car’s Bluetooth radio sucks, or you have a very nice pair of wired headphones you like using, or you simply want to be able to plug your phone into a random audio source at some party, being told to buy a dongle instead sucks. It’s just one more tiny little $10 widget which will get lost or worn out or rendered useless in a laundry mishap.
Apple made a trade off, but in this instance, it does not seem like a worthwhile trade off and it does hurt their image when they make some seemingly anti-customer choice like this. Even people that weren’t personally affected and didn’t mind shelling out for a set of AirPods or W1 Beats might change their perception when enough shit hits the fan and is flung in the face of those around them.
> what really makes it is being able to invoke and use Siri reliably when my phone is in my pocket
Interestingly, my AirPods seem to be defective and this is something that mine won't do ;)
> Apple made a trade off, but in this instance, it does not seem like a worthwhile trade off and it does hurt their image when they make some seemingly anti-customer choice like this.
Every Apple device is a tradeoff. It just so happens that the removal of the headphone jack was a trade off that a larger-than-usual number seem to have taken issue with, though it's not clear that this is a perspective shared by the majority of iPhone users.
> Interestingly, my AirPods seem to be defective and this is something that mine won't do ;)
Ah! Of course! Sadly there is no warranty replacement for your problem. ;(
Kidding aside, Siri required some work to understand and shape into a useful tool, but it was worth it to me to make sure I never pulled out my phone without the intention of doing the specific task I pulled it out to do, and only those tasks that require me to look at the screen. Phone calls, playing podcasts, audiobooks and music, and setting alarms, timers and reminders basically work. Haven’t found a way to do Calendar appointments in the level of detail and granularity I prefer though, so I just continued doing that mostly on my laptop.
Not for everyone, but once I figured out how to make Siri useful after years of not using it at all, it was the killer app for AirPods. Still won’t tick nearly all the boxes on anyone’s Butler-in-a-Box wishlist though.
> Every Apple device is a tradeoff. It just so happens that the removal of the headphone jack was a trade off that a larger-than-usual number seem to have taken issue with, though it's not clear that this is a perspective shared by the majority of iPhone users.
I’m not at all disagreeing that every Apple device is a tradeoff. I don’t think I even implied that it wasn’t, what I’m getting at is that on top of the other trade offs they have already made, that this additional trade off, for the reasons they did it, may not have actually been a good one, and I don’t think it has to affect a majority of users to still be a bad tradeoff.
If, and I’m pulling this number from my ass, but if 20% of your existing install base is unhappy with a decision you made on a model they would otherwise have no problem purchasing, but 80% are at worse indifferent, then you’ve still pissed off 20% of your customers.
It might be 15%, or 10%, or 5% or something even lower, but with a customer base as large as Apple’s, that is still a lot of people that may not be buying iPhones the next time they do, or might but will be dissatisfied, and express this dissatisfaction to their social groups. It still tarnishes the brand. If this were the only thing that tarnished Apple’s brand in recent years it might be fine, but it’s not and the removal of the headphone jack didn’t happen in a vacuum.
An FM tuner? Who the hell still listens to FM by choice? AM at least has news and traffic, but FM? I guess we could complain that iPhone doesn’t have a TV tuner either like circa 2002 Samsung phones.
Apple is trying to sell in more countries than just the US, Canada and the Western European nations. Certainly having an AM radio tuner would be even more compelling, but if you’re trying to appeal in a market you’ve mostly priced yourself out of, lacking features considered standard to that market isn’t a great starting point.
I’m not saying it isn’t an acceptable loss, but it doesn’t look great when you’re removing additional features on top of the ones you just never had.
Or to put it another way, just because you and I don’t care about something in our corner of the world doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole world out there that Apple is, theoretically at least, trying to sell phones to.
Im curious: can you give me example of how you would use a vacuum tube port on your iphone?
Here is my story: i left my cruise cabin in the middle of the night and went to the bow. In shock I discovered it was almost as bright as a daylight - oh my the full moon looks beautiful. I was alone and played the titanic scene for a monent. Imagine me alone, warm summer night, carribeans, full moon and cruise ship gliding through quiet ocean. Perfect moment hard to repeat with all these circumstances. I immediately reach out to my pocket to put headsets on just to listen to some Leonard Cohen’s songs. Imagine my shock when I realized I forgot the iphone’s jack adapter ;(
Nah, the headphone jack can move to the history books already. They oughta replace it with something standard, though, like USB-C. Bluetooth isn't an acceptable total replacement as long as batteries add bulk and need to be recharged. When that's fixed, Bluetooth everywhere will be fine also.
Bluetooth has lag, which makes it useless for playing instruments (say guitar).
Analog jacks are a nice feature, moving the DAC through another interface doesn't solve much.
I don’t use it. I use AirPods or Beats. I’m not doing studio mixing or mastering on my iPhone, so being able to use $1000 wired reference headphones isn’t a use case I care about. Even on my laptop, I use an Apogee interface when I need perfect wired audio. I realize that some people do care about the headphone jack, but that’s quixkly going the way of the floppy drive for most users.
Not a single person I’ve talked to that has gone from Touch ID to Face ID says it is a downgrade. Quite the opposite — they are completey enamored by this feature.
Almost every other company has followed Apple’s move and removed the headphone jack. This really isn’t much of an issue, especially as wireless becomes more ubiquitous.
Do you actually think the average Apple consumer gives any thought into the type of screws? Really?
FaceID is a downgrade for my usage primarily because it requires you to be looking fairly directly at the phone to unlock(even with that “require attention” setting turned off). There are countless times when I want to casually unlock and check or adjust something from the corner of my eye, rather than devoting my full attention to my phone(even an Apple Watch giving me many notifications instead of the phone). It’s especially bad in the car where you can’t unlock your phone without obstructing your vision.
Also when laying on the couch your face is often squished making it not recognize you. I also like to use my devices in landscape orientation meaning that the camera used for FaceID is obstructed. Landscape orientation with TouchID put your thumb right where it needed to be to unlock the device!
With TouchID I basically never reverted to using a passcode, and now with FaceID I’d estimate it’s 20% of the time I use a passcode and another 20% of the time I have to reposition my face or my hands after it fails in order to get it to work.
The only benefit of the new mechanism for me is eliminating bezel space require for the fingerprint sensor. That’s a big benefit, but it comes with very annoying first world problems, which are especially annoying since prices for these devices have gone up so much recently.
As someone with two pairs of AirPods, the lack of a headphone jack also annoys me. Most commonly when in a car with and aux jack and no Bluetooth. Bluetooth devices also require charging one more battery. High end earbuds and IEMs also require a 3.5mm jack and IIRC it might not even be possible to do high end audio via BT due to how it works for audio(something about the audio getting recompressed).
Also Apple: Removes headphone jacks, quadruples prices, sues people fixing their phones, removes fingerprint reader, nerfs nfc, replaces screws with pentalobes